Samuel Coleridge - The Complete Essays, Lectures & Letters of S. T. Coleridge (Illustrated)

Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word, for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE EXCURSION, characteristic of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary this information renders the man’s language, feelings, sentiments, and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes of anecdote? Finally when this, and this alone, could have induced a genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure “ornament of society lately deceased” in some obscure town,) as

“Among the hills of Athol he was born

There, on a small hereditary Farm,

An unproductive slip of rugged ground,

His Father dwelt; and died in poverty;

While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,

The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,

A little One — unconscious of their loss.

But ere he had outgrown his infant days

His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,

Espoused the teacher of the Village School;

Who on her offspring zealously bestowed

Needful instruction.”

“From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,

In summer tended cattle on the Hills;

But, through the inclement and the perilous days

Of long-continuing winter, he repaired

To his Step-father’s School,”-etc.

For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet; and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.

Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.

The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28, and 62 of the Poems, vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the VIth Book of THE EXCURSION.

Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale.

It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such lines, as

“They flash upon that inward eye,

Which is the bliss of solitude!”

in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed “the bliss of solitude?” Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to —

“And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.” Vol. I. p. 328.

The second instance is from vol. II. page 12, where the poet having gone out for a day’s tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together with their children and asses, in some field by the roadside. At the close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place. “Twelve hours,” says he,

“Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I

Have been a traveller under open sky,

Much witnessing of change and cheer,

Yet as I left I find them here!”

Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries:

“The weary Sun betook himself to rest: —

— Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,

Outshining, like a visible God,

The glorious path in which he trod.

And now, ascending, after one dark hour,

And one night’s diminution of her power,

Behold the mighty Moon! this way

She looks, as if at them — but they

Regard not her: — oh, better wrong and strife,

Better vain deeds or evil than such life!

The silent Heavens have goings on

The stars have tasks! — but these have none!”

The last instance of this defect,(for I know no other than these already cited) is from the Ode, page 351, vol. II., where, speaking of a child, “a six years’ Darling of a pigmy size,” he thus addresses him:

“Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind, —

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find!

Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,

A Present which is not to be put by!”

Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets “deaf and silent,” with the apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, “Philosopher”), the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a “Master brood o’er a Slave,” or “the Day” brood at all; we will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read “the eternal deep?” In what sense is he declared to be “for ever haunted” by the Supreme Being? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Mighty Prophet, a blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings indeed; but such as would presuppose an immediate revelation to the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his inspiration. Children at this age give us no such information of themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are many of us that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into some unknown abyss.